Calendar
A 6-week series to help us develop a deeper analysis and to call attention to the kinds of changes needed in the City’s budget and policies.
4/15 – Housing
4/22 – Economy
4/29 – Education
5/6 – Public Health
5/13 – Neighborhood Life
5/20 – Public Safety
The first week’s workshop on the Housing Indicators is the first of a 6-week series to help us develop a deeper analysis and to call attention to the kinds of changes needed in the City’s budget and policies.
Join us for this deeper dive into the Equity Indicators Report for the City of Oakland. Released last year, it clearly shows the effects of white supremacy on our community. Oakland posted a failing score of 33.5 out of a possible 100 across all indicators. This was the lowest score of all cities that participated in this national study.
Carroll Fife, the founder of Black Women & Elected Leadership, the Executive Director of Oakland ACCE, and one of the founding members of Community READY Corps, will join us as a guest speaker to provide some deeper analysis of the report’s findings and point us to actual solutions that will advance racial justice and equity in our housing market.
Because of the COVID pandemic we will be meeting virtually via Zoom on the first Monday of the month.
Meeting ID: 828 0976 4186
The Oscar Grant Committee Against Police Brutality & State Repression (OGC) is a
grassroots democratic organization that was formed as a conscious united front for justice against police brutality. The OGC is involved in the struggle for police accountability and is committed to stopping police brutality.
In alliance with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) we organized the October 23, 2010 labor and community rally for Justice for Oscar Grant. On that day the ILWU shut down the Bay Area ports in solidarity. Our mission is to educate, organize and mobilize people against police and state repression. Sisters and brothers! The Oscar Grant Committee invites you to join us in this vital struggle.
We meet on the 1st Monday of each month
You can join our discussion list by sending a blank (doesn’t even need a subject) email to
oscargrantcommittee-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
KAISER HAS LOST ITS WAY. IT’S ON US TO GET KAISER BACK ON TRACK.
JOIN US FOR A RALLY TO SAVE KAISER GARDENERS!
LABOR, COMMUNITY, ELECTED OFFICIALS AND INTERFAITH LEADERS WILL JOIN US
AND SEIU-UHW FOR THEIR MAY 7TH/MAY 8TH ACTIONS AT ONE KAISER PLAZA,
OAKLAND, CA AGAINST KAISER PERMANENTE. ONCE KNOWN AS A LEADER FOR GOOD
JOBS, KAISER IS NOW AGGRESSIVELY OUTSOURCING JOBS TO LESS EXPERIENCED
WORKERS FOR POVERTY WAGES AND NO BENEFITS.
TUESDAY, MAY 7TH
· 5PM: RALLY/PRESS CONFERENCE
· 6PM: SET UP GARDENING AREA/SET UP TENTS
· 9PM: CANDLELIGHT VIGIL
Let Libby Schaaf know how we can fix Oakland’s broken budget when she presents her budget at the Oakland City Council Meeting on May 7th. Tell her we need to Defund OPD and Invest in Community!!
[Event] Defund OPD and Invest in Communityhttps://t.co/aEDPOYzE6Z
— Indybay (@Indybay) May 6, 2019
Healing Justice, explores the causes and consequences of the current North American justice system and its effect on marginalized communities. The film walks back through the history of violence that has led to our current system, bringing into focus the histories of trauma – on a personal, interpersonal, community, and generational level. This powerful documentary addresses the school-to-prison pipeline, the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform, and the importance of healing and restorative practices.
Designed for dialogue, Healing Justice is meant to prompt questions and open conversations, exploring trauma, justice, and healing:
• What is justice, really?
• How do our current structures discount and dehumanize young people of color as well as our poorest and most vulnerable citizens?
• How does trauma impact us personally and interpersonally, as a community and throughout generations?
• How do these histories affect who is perceived as a ‘perpetrator’ and a ‘victim’ of violence?
• Why is healing on both individual and collective levels so important – and so often overlooked – components of justice?
• How can restorative practices, such as restorative justice, be used to shift the way we address crime and violence in our communities to produce safer, healthier, thriving communities for all?
Join us on Tuesday, May 7, 6:30 PM at the New Parkway Theater for a screening of Healing Justice! After-show discussion lead by the filmmaker Shakti Bulter and a participant in the film, Malachi Scott!
You are being watched.
Whether through your phone or your car or your credit card, caught on a CCTV camera or tracked through your online viewing history, government agencies know where you are, and are quietly collecting your most intimate, mundane, and personal information.
Is this even legal?
Habeas Data shows how the explosive growth of surveillance technology has outpaced our understanding of the ethics, mores, and laws of privacy.
Award-winning tech reporter Cyrus Farivar makes the case by taking ten historic court decisions that defined our privacy rights and matching them against the capabilities of modern technology. It’s an approach that combines the charge of a legal thriller with the shock of the daily headlines.
Throughout the history of capitalism, wealthy elites from a handful of countries have managed to impose their dominance across the world, subjecting people, land, and resources in the Global South to intense forms of exploitation. Socialists call this system imperialism, and see it as a central feature of the capitalist global economy. But it’s often difficult to see how exactly imperialism works, who it benefits, or how it manages to maintain control.
Join East Bay DSA on Tuesday, May 7th as we discuss imperialism in the 21st century, its roots in European colonialism, and as we set the stage for a future discussion about tearing it down.
Accessibility: Wheelchair-accessible entrance and restrooms
Required Readings
See the readings that we’ll be discussing after a brief introduction from our members.
Buy Tickets 415.392.4400
CITY ARTS & LECTURES
Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, which explores the ways in which the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” through philanthropy preserve the status quo and obscure their own role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. His past books include India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking and The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, which has been adapted into a film, to be released in 2019. He is also an editor-at-large for TIME, an on-air political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, as well as a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, as well as for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.
Courtney E. Martin is the author of five books, including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists and The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream. She is also the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and has collaborated with a wide range of organizations, including TED, The Aspen Institute, and the Obama Foundation. She won the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics and holds an honorary doctorate from ArtCenter College of Design.
Don’t use #uber, #lyft tomorrow! Drivers on strike! #LA, #SanDiego, #SanFrancisco, #Chicago, #Atlanta, #Connecticut, #WashingtonDC, #Philadelphia, #NewYork, #Boston pic.twitter.com/bd66vTVnGk
— Occupy Oakland (@OccupyOakland) May 8, 2019
On May 8th, the NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) will hold its annual conference in Oakland. NSVF — funded by billionaire donors is a venture capital fund that works to expand charter school proliferation in local communities like Oakland. Unchecked charter growth already costs OUSD schools over $57 million a year. Oakland kids deserve better — and Oakland won’t let NSVF hold a conference in our Town without a response.
Join us in the streets on May 8th as the conference begins, and we’ll tell NSVF to get out of Oakland! Educators, parents, students, and community members are all welcome and encouraged. We want to show that working class solidarity is strong in Oakland, so let’s show up in force! Bring any signs and DSA/OEA swag you have!
OEA will be organizing speakers, music, and providing food.
The Ella Baker Center’s monthly member meeting will be held on Wednesday, May 8th; the second week of May in order to accommodate for the May Day rally happening tomorrow, Wednesday, May 1st.
This month’s member meeting will include a new member orientation. If you are interested in learning about our membership, the Ella Baker Center in general, or what is happening with criminal justice reform at a state level we invite you to join us.
This is an open meeting and a free dinner will be provided. Please join us and bring a friend.
Join Oakland Privacy to organize against the surveillance state, police militarization and ICE, and to advocate for surveillance regulation around the Bay.
We fight against “pre-crime” and “thought-crime,” spy drones, facial recognition, police body cameras and requirements for “backdoors” to cellphones, to list just a few invasions of our privacy by all levels of Government.
We draft and push for privacy legislation for City Councils, at the County level, and in Sacramento. We advocate in op-eds and in the streets. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and believe no one is illegal.
Oakland Privacy originally came together in 2013 to fight against the Domain Awareness Center, Oakland’s citywide networked mass surveillance hub. OP was instrumental in stopping the DAC from becoming a city-wide spying network.
Our major projects currently include local legislation to regulate state surveillance (we got the strongest surveillance regulation ordinance in the country passed in Oakland!), opposing Urban Shield (now gone!) and pushing back against ICE with local legislation.
If you are interested in joining the Oakland Privacy email listserv, coming to a meeting, or have questions, send an email to:
Check out our website: http://oaklandprivacy.org/ Follow us on twitter: @oaklandprivacy
Check out our sister site DeportICE.
“WATCHING YOU WATCHING US”
Oakland Privacy works regionally to defend the right to privacy and enhance public transparency and oversight regarding the use of surveillance techniques and equipment. Oakland Privacy drove the passage of surveillance regulation and transparency ordinances in Oakland and Berkeley and is kicking off new processes in Richmond and Alameda County. To help slow down the encroaching police state all over the Bay Area, join us at the Omni.
Some agenda items of interest:
Pawlik Investigation Update
The Commission will discuss CPRA’s recent findings on the Pawlik investigation. Karen
Tom and Joan Saupe will review the process. This is a new item. (Attachment 4)
IX. R-02: Searches of Individuals on Probation and Parole
The Commission will review an amended version of R-02: Searches of Individuals on
Probation or Parole, and will discuss the status of collaboration with OPD.
X. Oakland Black Officers Association (OBOA) Letter
The Commission will discuss allegations in the OBOA letter in the Oakland Post suggesting
disparate and/or racist implications for OPD hiring and discipline practices, and may hear
from a representative on behalf of the OBOA.
Join us for a FREE thought-provoking conversation about housing instability in the Bay Area – and to be a part of the solution!
Hosts 10th Mourning Mothers “Walk for Healing”
For Families and Friends of Homicide Victims and those impacted by PTSD”
(San Leandro – May 11, 2019) Hundreds are expected to join 1000 Mothers to Prevent Violence 10th annual “Mourning Mothers Walk for Healing” at the San Leandro Marina Park (Heron);
The Mourning Mothers Walk was started by Lorrain Taylor, founder and executive director of “1000 Mothers to Prevent Violence” to help grieving families dealing with PTSD and to raise awareness to the ongoing impact of violence on the community. Lorrain Taylor found walking the marina to be an alternative to taking prescribed anti-depressants. “Grief is crippling, walking helps ease my pain”, she said.
The Mourning Mothers Walk for Healing will provide an atmosphere of hope, healing and a fun environment for surviving family members and friends of gun violence victims who acutely feel the pain of loss and separation especially during Mother’s Day. “To be alone even with family and friends does not diminish the feelings of desolation, despair and sadness that so many survivors feel; but at least we will be together to support one another”, Taylor said.
The Mourning Mothers Walk for Healing will feature testimonials by homicide victim-survivors; prayer, praise and worship music by Bruce O’Neal band; live contemporary music and entertainment by world renown percussionist, Juan Escovedo, and 11-time Grammy award winner Tony Lindsay of Santana Band. Finally, Taylor, will share her story and songs she wrote and recorded: “Gumbo for my Soul” and “It’s Time to Take a Stand”.
San Leandro Mayor Pauline Cutter will honor 1,000 Mothers to Prevent Violence with a proclamation declaring the May 11th as Mourning Mother’s Day of Healing” for the City of San Leandro. Also, longtime supporters, Pastor Edwin Brown and members of Market St. Seventh Day Adventist Church will be joining us for the 3k Walk for Healing which begins at 9:00 a.m.
There will be raffles, food, face painting art and onsite physical and mental therapy
Lorrain Taylor, DMin., founded 1000 Mothers to Prevent Violence as part of her own healing process following the murders of her twin sons Albade and Obadiah Taylor, 22-year old college students, who were senselessly gunned down on the streets of Oakland by a serial killer while they were repairing a car together on February 8, 2000.
Please RSVP at http://www.1000Mothers.org or call (510) 581-0100 ASAP.
“1000 Mothers to Prevent Violence” is also accepting in kind and financial donations from the broader community. Mailing address: P.O. Box 781, Hayward, CA 94543. All donations are 501 c 3 tax deductible.
Opening Friday, April 5, please visit DESPERATE HOLDINGS REAL ESTATE & LandMind Spa, an immersive art installation organized by Cassie Thornton of the Feminist Economics Department (the FED). See our full website at http://www.desperateholdings.com.
Installation available for viewing through May 11th.
In 2015 Cassie Thornton, recently displaced from her San Francisco apartment, walked past the Salesforce Tower construction site in downtown San Francisco. Workers were digging 200 ft below, where they found Barbary Coast beams and thick clay-like soil. The foreman offered her and her friend a truckload of this clay, which would otherwise be sent to a toxic dump to be sanitized in Palo Alto. Since then Thornton has reconstituted, blended, and hoarded the precious clay, as liquid real estate. “At times the clay has had a home, even when I haven’t. The clay is beyond property, rent, and all the things that keep us from magic. If all I can do turn land into money, like any real estate agent, that is useless …. If I really had magic powers, what would this clay do?”
In this real estate office, we won’t sell property. Instead we will touch and hold liquid real estate sourced from underneath the financial district of SF as we imagine what it would mean to see land and our creative energies as a commons. The clay we share with our clients in this immersive installation holds the essence of the Bay Area. We are thankful for the millennia of land stewardship, reproductive labor, and revolutionary culture that has made this place so rich. Desperate Holdings is here to create new methods for land distribution which do not evict or destroy the very land and people who create this richness. In an artisanal process we have removed the toxic energy of real estate speculation by hand. For the first time in ages, you can safely touch, hold, or wear real estate as you transform into a future self, a person who holds and cares for land as if it was home.
This pop-up real estate office and spa has agents available to deal with your broken trust, lost hope and longing for a nonexistent stability. Bring your tight little pent up body over here and imagine what it would mean to see land and our creative energies as a commons, and vengeance as creative fuel. Real Estate Agents and Spa Technicians played by local artists, activists and healers, will be offering services and treatments that are meant to unravel fantasies of the good life as it relates to private property ownership on stolen land. These agents will channel their own precarious financial survival to help you heal your broken potential for finding escape, security or shelter.
Doughnut Economics Reading Group:
Creating a world with neither human suffering nor planetary peril
Doughnut Economics: 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist
By Kate Raworth Chelsea Green Publishing (2017)
The capitalist economic system defines every aspect of our lives: the schooling and medical care we get, where we live, and how we sustain ourselves. The system works for a lucky few and exploits everyone else. And it’s a real threat to the survival of our species (and many others) on this planet.
We know the system needs to change—but we can’t change what we don’t understand. We have to know what we’re talking about.
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics lays out traditional economic theory—still taught as gospel at all the major temples of capitalism—with clarity, authority, lots of graphics, and quite a bit of humor. She exposes the flawed models and persistent myths that keep the system in place. Even more importantly, she presents seven big, basic ideas with which to begin creating the world we want to see. We can indeed build an economy in the “doughnut”—meeting the needs of all while maintaining the biospheres that support us.
All of us need to read this book. We’ve all grown up in this deeply unfair and absurd system; seeing it clearly and getting free of it require a group effort.
So we at Strike Debt Bay Area are sponsoring a group discussion of Doughnut Economics. We’re doing one meeting a month on the 2nd Saturday; we’ll usually do about one chapter per meeting. Please join us!
4th meeting:
4:30 – 6:00pm, Saturday, February 9th.
Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck Avenue, Oakland
We’ll be discussing the 4th chapter.
5th meeting:
4:30 – 6:00pm, Saturday, March 16th.
Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck Avenue, Oakland
We’ll be discussing the 5th chapter.
6th meeting:
4:30 – 6:00pm, Saturday, April 13th.
Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck Avenue, Oakland
We’ll be discussing the 6th chapter.
7th meeting:
4:30 – 6:00pm, Saturday, May 11th.
Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck Avenue, Oakland
We’ll be discussing the 7th chapter and the concluding chapters, and discussion possible futures for the group.
Bring the book (available at your favorite online bookseller and in select local bookstores) and/or your thoughts on the topic (The first and possibly subsequent chapters are available online – http://tinyurl.com/ycysqtde ‘Look Inside’).
The book is an easy read (but full of ideas!) so it’s easy to catch up.
Author website: https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
Please join us for a talk by Jenny Odell in celebration of her new book How to Do Nothing / Resisting the Attention Economy.
”A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention—and our personal information—that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we’ve been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world
Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity . . . doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance.
So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing (at least as capitalism defines it). Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.
Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book is a four-course meal in the age of Soylent.”
Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Her work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it’s birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. She created The Bureau of Suspended Objects, a searchable online archive of 200 objects salvaged from the San Francisco dump, each with photographs and painstaking research into its material, corporate, and manufacturing histories. She is compelled by the ways in which attention (or lack thereof) leads to consequential shifts in perception at the level of the everyday.
Odell’s visual work has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, Ever Gold Projects, the Marjorie Barrick Museum (Las Vegas), Les Rencontres D’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), the Lishui Photography Festival (China), the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, apexart (NY), East Wing (Dubai), and the Google headquarters. She has been an artist in residence at Recology SF (the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Palo Alto Art Center, Facebook, and the Internet Archive and has taught internet art and digital/physical design at Stanford since 2013.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, SFMOMA’s Open Space, McSweeney’s, The Creative Independent, Sierra Magazine, Topic, and Real Future.
Sun, May 12
Turkey at the cross roads of imperialism
Turkey is struggling to find a new and better position in the world while fascism erodes the economy, human rights, freedom of press and all opposition. New “elections” on March 31 is only a sham as mounting evidence of corruption piles. Turkey has lost on Syria, a quagmire it planned on winning big with the bog guys. As Turkey oscillates between European Union, the USA and Russia, it finds itself more and more irrelevant. Contrary to the big plans of becoming a leader in the Middle East, Turkey has been relegated to a position where it is only trying to find who to follow. Such is the position of those who accept imperialism instead of standing up to it. ICSS member Mehmet Bayram will present and lead our discussion. TENTATIVE
Sun, May 19
¡VIVA MEXICO!
Mexican President Díaz (1876-1880 and 1884-1911) famously commented: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.”
Diaz got it at least half right. Mexico has suffered in the shadow of the Colossus of the North, but Mexico is not poor. Mexico is rich in many ways, yet it also has been impoverished. And Mexico has been greatly underappreciated by North Americans. This presentation will emphasize the many poorly known accomplishments of Mexico, while uncovering the role of US imperialism.
Mexico is bucking an international right-wing tide, shifting its government from right to left-of-center with the presidential inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on December 1. Speaking for international capital, The Economist is worried. The other 99% of humanity is hopeful.
Roger Harris will present a PowerPoint-illustrated cautionary history of this trice conquered land. A longtime activist with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, Roger is on the board of the Task Force on the Americas (http://taskforceamericas.org/), a 33-year-old human rights organization, and is active with the Campaign to End US-Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela (https://tinyurl.com/yd4ptxkx). He last visited Mexico in March.
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND
Sun, May 26, 2019: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
Report from Venezuela Delegation
Venezuela is in the cross hairs of imperialism. It has the largest oil reserves in the world, but more than that, Venezuela is determined to use its resources for the benefit of its own people instead of handing them over to transnational corporations or imperialist rulers. In the age of imperialism, these trends are enough to make any country the target of imperialist plunderers. We are under a media barrage of lies, misinformation, and open US propaganda about Venezuela. With this intense muddying of waters it becomes very hard to know and understand the events happening around this Latin American, Bolivarian, country.
In order to observe what is really going on there, recently Bay Area residents Mehmet Bayram, ICSS member and journalist, and Laura Wells, Green Party Congressional Candidate, visited Venezuela with the “End Venezuela Sanctions” delegation. They will present their experience and lead the discussion afterwards.
Sun, June 9, 2019: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee
After 24 years in the USA, 38 years in the (East) German Democratic Republic as a McCarthy-era exile, then nearly 30 years in unified Germany, Victor Grossman, the ex-pat journalist and author examines the rise and fall of a socialist experiment as he observed and participated in it. He tries to clear through a fog of misinformation and distortion regarding it, describing its achievements, its successes as well as its blunders and negative aspects. Its position regarding Nazis and fascism is compared with that in West Germany. Its school system, women’s rights, both models in many ways, cultural questions and other matters are examined from a personal, anecdotal and sometimes humorous perspective.
The book then turns to a broader examination of possible lessons to be learned when searching for solutions to present-day problems: the growing gap between rich and poor, alarmingly malevolent dangers for a crippled environment, the menace of racism and new fascist movements, the almost ignored danger of atomic annihilation – and who is to blame for them. But the book also looks at newly invigorated hopes for a better, a socialist future despite the many barriers to its realization – seen through the prism of a veteran of the “old Left” in the USA, Communist rule and the Cold War in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and expresses his views on current fears and hopes on both sides of the Atlantic – and the Pacific.
(Copies of Victor’s book will be available for purchase, cash or checks only, NO CREDIT CARDS.
Sun, Jun 16, 2019: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
Cuba”s Democracy
Constitutional Referendum and grassroots political processes.
Cuba is always described as a “dictatorship” by the mainstream media and the U.S. government, thus providing a pretext for the economic blockade and talk about regime change. But Sharat G. Lin found a remarkable democratic process in the recent Constitutional Referendum in Cuba and months of nationwide discussions involving millions of voters. (Awaiting confirmation)